Problem Solving Questions

Question 1

Operational questions

Answer 1

How does your dev team manage builds and releases?
What integration and security testing does your dev team employ?
How do you roll back?

What kind of monitoring do you have in place for your applications?
Do you have logs/metrics from all your critical applications? All levels of service (infrastructure, applications)
What metrics are you monitoring?
How do your teams respond to alerts? What areas do you see could be improved?

Do you have a well-defined DR plan? How often do you perform DR testing?
What are your SLAs/SLOs?
Do you have RTOs and RPOs?

In what geographical regions are the users for your applications?

Question 2

Reliability questions

Answer 2

Do you have measurable reliability goals?
Will your system need to be able to scale?

Networking:
Do you use dynamic routing?

Databases:
Do you have specific requirements around latency, replication, and consistency?

Question 3

Performance questions

Answer 3

Compute:
Do you have workloads that require different levels of compute?
Are your applications containerized or do they rely on legacy architecture?

Network:
How will external services connect to the cloud?
What bandwidth do you require for connecting your VPC and on-prem network?

Storage:
How much and what types of storage do you require?
How will your applications access storage?
Do you need active and/or archival storage?
Will you need storage for static web content? CDNs?

Databases:
What databases are you currently running? How do you use them (what use cases)?
Which are structured vs unstructured?

Question 4

Cost questions

Answer 4

Do you have issues with uncontrolled/unexpected spend? Do you use service quotas/limits?

Storage:
Do you need active and/or archival storage?

Question 5

Security and compliance questions

Answer 5

IAM:
What roles in your organization will require access to the infrastructure?
What access requirements do members of each role have for resources?
How do you manage user identity and access?
Will you need to federate from an existing identity provider?
Do you manage users in groups?
Do you use service accounts? How do you manage usage?
Do you audit privileged access activity or changes to IAM policies?
Do you use/enforce MFA?
Do you use custom access policies?

Networking:
What networking requirements do you have internally between your applications?
How will external services connect to the cloud?
How do you segment and access control to your network? Based on applications? Teams?
Do you have a governance process for creating or updating networking deployments? How often do you audit?
Do you have a separate network for sensitive applications? How do you monitor and restrict access?
Do you audit network access permissions (i.e. SSH, RDP)?
Do you look at network flow logs?

Data:
Do you have process and governance requirements for encryption?

Databases:
How do you govern access to your databases (for both applications and internal consumers)?

Question 6

Migration questions

Answer 6

Databases:

Do you have any dependencies on legacy databases or versions?

Question 7

Migration questions

Answer 7

Assess:
Do you have an inventory of your environment? This would include all software and dependencies (apps, message brokers), mgmt tools (config mgmt, CI/CD), servers (physical and virtual), network appliances (firewalls, routers, switches, etc.).
Do you have an idea of which apps you want to migrate first (criteria could be no. of dependencies, criticality to business, migration difficulty)?
Have your key administrators and users received cloud training?
Have you identified workloads you’d be interested in doing a PoC on?

Databases:
Do you have any dependencies on legacy databases or versions?